1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and a method for managing a spam number in a mobile communication terminal. More specifically, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for determining a spam index according to phone number and filtering messages or calls from a phone number designated as a sender of advertisements.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, due to the increased usage of mobile communication terminals, there is an increasing trend of service providers using the mobile communication terminals as a means for advertising. For example, service providers may send messages or calls to mobile communication terminals to perform advertising. However, because these one-sided advertising messages or calls are sent to the mobile communication terminals irrespective of users' intentions to receive the advertisements, many users suffer an inconvenience of having to delete or filter undesired advertising messages or calls individually. The terms “spam message” or “spam phone call” denote advertising messages or calls undesired by the user.
Conventional mobile communication terminals or mobile communication service providers provide functions that enable users to filter the spam messages or spam phone calls. FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating a conventional screen configuration for registering a spam number in a mobile communication terminal. For example, as illustrated in FIG. 1, the mobile communication terminal provides a function of registering a specific phone number as a spam number and filtering messages or calls from the spam number. Also, the mobile communication service provider provides a supplementary service of filtering messages or calls from a phone number requested by a user.
However, because conventional mobile communication terminals limit the number of phone numbers registrable as spam numbers, if the number of previously registered spam numbers is equal to the maximum value, a user suffers an inconvenience of having to delete the previously registered spam number in order to register an additional spam number or give up registering the additional spam number. Also, there is a problem that, despite a fact that spam messages or calls are no longer received from phone numbers registered as spam numbers, the user is not notified that the messages or calls are not received.
Also, there a user must directly contact a mobile communication service provider and perform an authentication procedure to use a supplementary service of filtering messages or calls from the mobile communication service provider. In this conventional system, an ill-intentioned third party may make ill use of the supplementary service by fraudulently using user information and requesting, changing or canceling the supplementary service.